I hadn't had a chance to read this in over a month, I'm practically just now picking up where I left off.

Couple of random questions:

I was looking at the title screen and wondered, is there any significance to the way the kanji are written? (They both look rather tall and the kanji for princess is shaped funny at the bottom.) If no one has the slightest idea that's fine.

For one/several of the decisions (I -think- it was the three where you choose whether or not to keep waiting for Arcueid, but it might have been an earlier one) I noticed if you didn't wait, it led to a different day-number-thing (Not the actual date) than if you wait. I think the number actually shrank; instead of going up to 11, it was down to 9? What's up with that? Is that a dead end of some kind? I only read the very beginning of it with Shiki being woken up by Hisui so I didn't see how deep the rabbit hole went.

Finished/got first ending. Wow, that was a lot shorter than I was expecting (I guess I shouldn't have been expecting F/sn length, especially without voice acting.)

Guess I should get the Arcueid True Ending next before moving on to Ciel?

Also, does anyone have any idea on how "safe" scene skipping is? I know in F/sn there was at least one scene the game offered to skip for me which I declined that ended up having slightly different dialog.

Well, hopefully it's okay to "rush" through to get the True Ending, because I don't want to re-read four of the arcs in their entirety! (Setting aside the entire month of June that I missed out on, it still took me most of May+early July to get this much read.)

Maybe an easier question would be if there are any important bits you can miss by skipping.

Yes, Tsukihime only skips scenes that you've already seen. There's no risk in skipping things. Personally I preferred to ctrl-skip through stuff though, so I can still see what's going on, and maybe read stuff I didn't pay attention to before.

Oddly enough the game didn't consider me to have seen the last scene(s) and the option did not come up to skip them when I was doing things over.

Hopefully me moving savegames around (Solution to limited saves: create subfolders with new saves periodically) isn't messing anything up. I assume there's another "save" file that keeps track of CG you've unlocked as well as whether or not you've ever completed the game.

Got the Good Ending a lot faster than I expected last night. For some reason I thought it would be like UBW where you have to start from the beginning and change your decisions leading up to the end. Instead it created one new final decision at the end. Well, that was easy.Aww, the fact that the Good Ending is technically not the "canon" ending is as bittersweet as the True Ending. (But wait, I guess technically none of the endings except for Kohaku's are the TRUE True Ending? I don't know of a sequel to Tsukihime but there's probably something somewhere that hinges on there being one specific ending to events.I'm also going to assume some of the CG I haven't unlocked for Arcueid will come up in other routes (I know I missed at least one dead end, but I doubt that alone would fill in as many blanks as I have. I did try to get as many as possible (Something I continually regret not having done for F/sn.) In addition to seeing the Good Ending, I also went back and grabbed another couple of Dead Ends ("Hey, doesn't going all of the way with Arcueid in That Scene have any consequences down the line?.... YEP.") So as far as Arcueid's route alone is concerned, I think I should have gotten close to everything that was available.

So I'm doing Ciel's route, and I haven't noticed any obvious dead ends for her route yet. Not a single one. ( Are they all 20+ minutes of reading after decisions? Piling bad decisions on top of each other? Do they exist?

I think I left off at the start of.. Day 12? *edit* (It was Day 11, derp.) It's after Shiki goes back to sleep? after having sleepwalked his way into almost murdering some girl. Wow, this route is lasting longer than I thought it would based on the day Arcueid's route ended. I figured something bad would happen soon after Ciel showed up again at school and everything seemed far too idyllic and perfect.. but I assumed it would be in response to Shiki getting one day of fun out in the town with Ciel to lull you into a false sense of security. I didn't consider the story wouldn't even let him have that much. And what a tease the game is if you pick the "wrong" option (According to the walkthrough) and try to go anyway, you get to Ciel in a new dress for about 5 seconds before Shiki passes out. Just so you know Shiki, she REALLY was there waiting for you, but you RUINED IT by passing out. Whoops! Too bad!*edit*Man I thought picking the "It's okay if Kokaku comes inside, nothing bad will happen" option would score me a quick bad end. But it didn't! It just went on and on until I realized I was no longer in pure dead end territory and reloaded, giving up. What a disaster that was. That was not how I wanted to see those scenes for the first time. (

Arcueid, you cheater, that was Ciel's good ending, you had yours already! No! Bad!I wonder if that one time really was the only instance where Ciel wears that dress. Strange thing to use an art asset on. I probably would have been lazy and just described it without any visuals. >_>

Start of the Far Side spoilers? (And spoilers for the Near Side I guess.)

I kept wondering what happened to Yumizuka in the other routes, but then eventually forgot about it because she never said anything past the first day anyway (I thought maybe she was the girl that Nero killed in the park, but it never said; if that was her that casts a depressing shadow over the first two arcs.) Well.. I'm not out of the first day yet but she's already said a lot more than before to the point where she's already getting into "Hey how come she doesn't have a route" territory. With so much left it's obviously a bad idea to ask though. I guess I'll find out.. or if not, then I'll ask.

I'm a little unclear on the timeline of events though.. so Yumizuka never returned home the first day, even though she was on her way home? So as opposed to being attacked on her way home, she herself went straight from there where she parted with Shiki to go downtown to look for Shiki and that's when -Something- got her? Do I have it right? Or are there unknown circumstances involved and I should stop asking questions so soon? This is a tricky business.

I guess in the Near Side routes she's just randomly killed by Arcueid or Ciel. Also depressing. Man I didn't think I was playing a Key game (Okay, that's unfair. Key would be if she died of vampire cancer at the end, and then a balloon and something bad happens and what did I just read??)

she's actually fine and she's not a vampire in that version. Although in the VN version I think SHIKI got to her though. As for the thing with Nero pretty much she did get sick during that time, but her family's name was on there becuase they had a reservation during that time period.

- Finding my way through this garden is rather unbearable, but if it is to keep the one I adore company I will endure it for her sake, and her sake alone.

if Arcueid has any REAL appearances left in any of the routes. One of the dead ends where Ciel is saying "Well at least I got an appearance" to.. mini.. cat.. Arcueid (Does she have a proper name?) seems to suggest she does not, at least in Akiha's route.

On one hand I don't want to eagerly anticipate something that's never going to happen (Kind of like the original Fate/stay night anime, where

the 2nd intro makes you think Archer will be back somehow if you don't know any better.)

On the other hand, if I ask and I get the answer I want to hear, that will immediately color my perceptions of how things are going to go down if I Know Something is going to happen, with the saving grace of having something to look forward to. And if I ask and I DON'T get the answer I want to hear, then I'm hosed with NO silver lining at all, and it will probably sour the whole thing in the short term.

Okay I'll answer that one portion from one of your spoilers without using a spoiler. The SD neko version of Arcueid is nothing more than Neco Arc. Also there is another version known as Neco Arc Chaos, who happens to be an SD neko version of Nero Chaos.

- Finding my way through this garden is rather unbearable, but if it is to keep the one I adore company I will endure it for her sake, and her sake alone.

Oh. Er, any idea why is it spelled with a 'c'? (Maybe a similar reason to why Niconico is spelled that way?) Is the Nero version in the original VN, or is that something else? That sounds like a frightful image.

Other game spoilers (I think I'm on Day 11 now? Why can't I remember these?)

Ohhhhhhhhh, so that's why he attacked Arcueid. I was convinced it was mind control from an as yet unseen force that just hadn't been revealed yet.. which I guess was sort of the case. But wait, if Shiki's blood causes him to become a psychotic murderer against non-humans, how come it only happened like THAT just that one time? Shouldn't it have been impossible to hold a conversation with her? Shouldn't the same thing have happened as soon as he saw her again on the way to school the next day? I should probably stop asking questions about that now.So it sounds like the guy in the prologue who killed Shiki's real mother is Tohno Makihisa? (And somewhere in this route I could have sworn Shiki mentioned something about a guy with red hair, which given recent events, sounds about right.) Was that a confirmation of that from this route, or do I need to keep reading before drawing any final conclusions? If it was, that's a bit disappointing, I'd hoped whoever that was would show up at some point, but he's supposed to be dead. I guess he could randomly get better in one of the routes. Oh well, I suppose having the True Final Boss just be some guy introduced at the last moment who Killed Your Parents would be too cliched and contrived.

So I find myself in the unusual position of reaching both endings at about the same time, somewhat by accident, somewhat by design (The game's, not mine.) Due to my dead end fishing I didn't follow the walkthrough to a T and uncovered an alternate route to the Normal ending. Or maybe I would have been suspicious anyway given that name. Noticeably absent from the choices is a "Good" ending. And given what the "Normal" ending was like the last time I saw one and how things seem to be here, my gut says "Normal" means "big downer."

So objectively speaking, if one wants to read the endings in ascending order of Goodness (Less happy/bad ending first->more happy/good ending last), what order should I read them in? Normal->True or True->Normal?

If there's no apparent net gain in either ending that's fine, or if it's so close that it's a tossup and really depends on individual opinion, don't sweat it or go into details, just give me your best estimate. Even if it's a downer either way I'd still rather close Akiha's route on as little a sour note as possible before moving on to Hisui.

I'm assuming not but just in case, is there a way to see the "Dream Sequence" H scene in the Far Side routes? I assume these exist because of missing CG for Akiha toward the back, and because they were choices in the Near Side routes. But not being able to properly match those up to the girl whose route you're doing bugs me. If you're going to end up with Arcueid or Ciel, it'd feel out of place to have a dream about one of the other girls. I guess you could keep a save handy from the other route and then a few days in load that and just pretend it happened then, but that'd be far from ideal.

I'm not reading this for the H scenes (It takes me two or three times my already slow normal rate to slog through them) but the completionist in me compels me to see everything. Especially after seeing the first ever H scene I can remember that had relevance to the plot.

I don't know why I keep thinking these are going to take so long to read, so far only Ciel's True Ending went on a lot longer than normal.

So that was.. different. So Shiki died, except not. I assume Akiha isn't crazy because in the first place there was no body. Then you've got her thing on top of all of that. But that just leaves me scratching my head. So.. uh.. where did he go? And why didn't he tell Akiha? Maybe leave a note or something? I'm not sure how the game would explain it in either of the other routes without a retread of this mysterious ending. Maybe I'll revisit this one after I finish everything if it still hasn't been answered by the game.

Also Ciel Sensei's lesson mentioned that Akiha is the only route who you didn't have to have like you to get one of the endings. Which is kind of disingenuous because IIRC you don't get ANY ending if Akiha doesn't like you. Although I thought that was the case with both Arcueid and Ciel too. But okay, if I accept this premise, which ending(s) are you locked out of in the Arcueid and Ciel routes if they don't like you enough?

Other question is still up in the air if anyone can and wants to answer!

That was a pretty good twist (The "they really did switch places!" one.) It's not often that I figure out the twist and then the narrative tricks me into discounting it as a possibility (I repeatedly scoffed at the idea even.) So when it does come true, it's a whole different kind of "Whaaaaaaat?"

I haven't read the epilogue yet (Either ending), I just got what I assume is the True Ending.

I'm.. a little confused at how the gallery is getting filled in. It looks like.. the Hisui/Kohaku gallery is almost entirely Hisui. There's like, almost no room for any Kohaku specific CG. Including H scenes, which is shocking but not unwelcome, though I am skeptical. I find it easier to believe they just can't be recorded in a gallery rather than that the artist who, as I heard, basically invented them for the game and who writes the H scenes, would quit here.

Dare I ask why they've left almost no space for Kohaku's route? I'll ask if I should ask!*edit*Question answered by game after finishing Hisui True Ending. Sorry, I'm used to navigating these things on eggshells, I'm not used to things resolving organically.

That certainly got dark. Hopefully the Good Ending lives up to its name.

In Kokaku's route, am I really supposed to pick the NON-Kohaku choice in that one instance where her choice leads to a CG of her and Shiki in the old Japanese style house, and then Akiha catches them, and I think she hits Kohaku? I forget how the other one was worded, but that leads instead to Hisui getting in trouble with Akiha, and that's the one the walkthrough says to pick. I simply can't wrap my head around the idea that that scene with Kohaku was something to be avoided.